Help. Encode to MP4 or F4V?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
November 24, 2009
1 reply
5999 views

I have tried countless times in finding out from Adobe what would be the best solution to use the already 100s of videos encoded to H.264 in the mp4 container. Unfortunately, salesmen never know the answer yet keep asking me to buy.

What benefits, if any is there to encoding to F4V over MP4 other than the ability to inject metadata without having to use a sidecar xmp file like you would if using MP4? The only downside I see with going F4V is that files will not be playable on set tops, gaming consoles, and also iPods.

Does FMS protect files already encoded to MP4 and if not, is there a tool to rewrap the MP4 into a F4V?

My overall goal is to be able to put all metadata needed into the file and use actionscript 3 to populate the information on a web page and in the future an AIR app. I would love to pull the trigger and buy FMS but it just seems like the salesmen are reading from a brochure and never once address my questions let alone find me answers.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Asa_-_FMS

Adobe Employee

F4V and MP4 are essentially the same file format as far as FMS is concerned. I can answer your questions here, but first are you comparing between our F4V/MP4 recording and FLV or truly between F4V and MP4 as they're practically the same thing?

Asa

pmasters8941Author

Participating Frequently

Well, technically, are they the same because from my understanding, the containers are different even though both can contain the same audio and video streams?

Perhaps a better question would be, should I have to re-encode my videos that were previously encoded to H.264 in an MP4 container to a file in a F4V container? That brings the question if I don't have to re-encode those files, why move to F4V if my current workflow is working for me?

One question I did have about protecting streams, when one protects a stream using FMS, does FMS place the file inside a protected wrapper (F4P) or does it protect the file on the fly? Last, is there any tool that Adobe has that can rewrap previously encoded MP4 files into the F4V format so metadata can travel with the file without the need to rely on a xmp sidecar file?

I really appreicate your help in these questions.

Asa_-_FMS

Adobe Employee

Well, F4V is just a file extension that means it's an implementation of the MP4 spec that Adobe promises to understand. I don't have a link to the ISO-spec right now, but essentially internally Adobe wanted a file extension that all products could create and not get stuck with a menu list of 3gp, mov, mp4, m4v, ... extensions that are supported and not. That's why I say that they're the same file format.

The only difference comes in that recorded F4Vs by FMS use MP4 fragments - the majority of mp4s out there don't, and that's because they don't have to do scalable recording on the fly. So, you don't have to move unless you gain something from it. FMS will write F4V files with fragments, and you can flatten them in post processing. I'd say to go with whatever workflow works best for you - and not presume to move you anywhere unless feature set is appealing enough.

As for protected content, I'll assume we're speaking of DRM packaging. In that case I'm a little out of my element but they certainly do protect the file on disk and FMS is more of a pass through of their DRM content. If we're speaking of FMS mechanisms like RTMPE or SWF Verification then we do nothing to the file and it's all 'on the wire' protections.

Hope that helps,

Asa

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